The lightning experiments done by Ben Franklin inspired Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb. This further led to the stories of motors and mechanical devices, which started powering the industrial revolution in the twentieth century and enabled humanity to reach this level. Electricity is now the driving force of all modern societies, which powers everything, from lights to vehicles.
Electricity is generated in several ways. As we know, fossil fuels have been burnt for many centuries now. Acted as the significant power generation source for all these times, fossil fuels are depleting now. Even though used widely, the nuclear and hydroelectric facilities were never truly competent against coal and natural gas in power generation capacities. However, lately, with the advancements in technologies related to harvesting unconventional energy sources, solar and wind energy generation are expanding.
The Job Market In The Unconventional Energy Sector – Paul Favret
- The expansion and increasing need for cleaner and renewable energy paved the way for the advancement in technology and many jobs related to those fields. For example, solar power development required workers to install PV (photovoltaic) panels. Similarly, wind energy generation requires the installation of enormous wind turbines with engineering perfection.
- Paul Favret points out that many people work as PV assemblers who set up and maintain the solar panels and allied systems used to convert solar energy into electric energy. Not just for this purpose, but solar energy is being used in various industrial applications, such as water heating, industrial drying, atmospheric conditioning in large plants, etc. All these tend to create skilled job opportunities for many.
- As the technologies related to unconventional energy sources develop day by day, more occupations are being expected. This job sector has been growing much faster when compared to the conventional job sectors during the last few years. The wind and solar energy sectors are expected to grow multifold over the next couple of decades. So, the resulting opportunities for the job seekers may also increase primarily over this period.
- For example, we can see that the PV panel installer jobs may grow by about 50 percent from 2019 to 2029. This is faster than the growth of about the average 8.7-percentage growth in all other occupations. The jobs related to wind techs may grow at a much higher rate of 60 percent during these ten years. However, experts point out that this rapid growth may result in about 10000 new jobs yearly during this projection period of 10 years.
While we consider this significant growth in the employment sectors directly related to wind and solar energy, we can also look at the indirect job opportunities these may create in different industrial sectors. For example, solar power is expected to bring revolutionary changes in agriculture, attracting more people into scientific farming and may further put forth a lot of new job opportunities. Paul Favret also points out that the industrialization of solar and wind power generation and distribution may also create many new opportunities over the next decade.